Frisbee tourney with Mount Fuji in the background

The first trimester is over and blogging has fell by the wayside as I've taken a vacation from life.  On the way to Tokyo Station on Friday, I dropped off my last final paper and headed to the nearby city of Shizuoka to nerd out at a four-day language conference.  Sean also left for the weekend to participate in a frisbee tournament.  I'm not actually sure who had more fun.

Thanksgiving spread

This past week we've loved having some days off together and spent them preparing to host an expat Thanksgiving feast, Christmas shopping and Christmas card writing.  We have one more week of vacation before classes start again for winter term next Friday.  

Sushi picnic during Friday shopping

Last week was also exciting because Sean officially received his Japanese work visa.  This is perfect timing because during the last two weeks Sean was spending a lot of his free time (when he wasn't playing frisbee) perfecting a mulled wine recipe.  After gallons of wine, orange juice, various citrus zests, bags of cinnamon sticks and God knows what else, it's time for a certain someone to go back to work (though the hot holiday drinks were delicious).  If you're looking for someone to talk to about the specific differences between Glog and mulled wine, Sean's your man.

Dressed up for a Rotary event - We go to about one a week

We've also been extremely grateful to receive some surprise care packages from friends and family from the U.S.  Susie sent us a pre-packaged Thanksgiving feast, Mary and Jay sent us a box crammed with baking mixes and candy and Misha sent us an adorable mix of cards and candy put together by her second grade class.

Susie's Thanksgiving care package

Sugar!

Second grade holiday care package

This weekend we've got the mini tree up, the Christmas music blaring, weird Christmas anime paper out for wrapping and backlogs of Glog on the stove.  We hope the beginning of your holiday season is just as festive.  Happy December!

Thanksgiving is over - time to try all of the Christmas beers

Student board work - we earned a red flower for the first time last week. I did #1.

One of the most enjoyable (but also the most challenging) parts of my Japan experience so far is learning the language.  With the Rotary Peace Fellowship program, we aren't required to take any Japanese language classes after the summer intensive course, but I decided to continue with the academic courses offered throughout the year.  This has several advantages and disadvantages.  First, I'm not allowed to take the classes pass/fail, so the grade counts on my transcript.  Unfortunately, the courses are extremely rigorous; on the first day the teacher basically said that they don't give out A's.  Also, it's a huge time suck.  I spend three mornings a week in class which limits my time for research and study for other graduate courses.  It also limits which graduate courses I can take since Japanese takes up three entire mornings.  It also demands a huge amount of work outside of class and we are all required to meet with a tutor once a week and individually with our instructor once a week as well.  The advantage of taking such a course is that I'm exposed to Japanese practice in class over 12 hours a week and it forces me to learn, practice and do work outside of class.

My usual blue flower with a rare red flower on homework

Though the teaching methods are pretty terrible, class sizes are small and we have formed into quite a nice little family.  To give you an example of the pedagogy, we haven't seen a single image or object used to teach vocabulary.  Instead, we memorize lists of words on a powerpoint.  There are little to no communicative activities.  The class is interesting to me because I can compare the teaching style to methods in the U.S. and it also forces me to practice . . . a lot.

Some handwriting practice with lots of correction

The Japanese teachers like to encourage competition between us students which I hate.  The highest reward for a student is a red flower on a paper.  A red flower indicates perfection and there are several students who get a red flower every time, which is announced at each distribution of homework, tests and quizzes.  I've only managed a red flower once or twice and have mostly been receiving blue flowers.  A blue flower is given if you correct your mistakes by yourself and then turn it in again.

Grammar practice for the final exam

This week is the last day of class and we had to perform a three minute memorized speech about "Our favorite person" with visual aids.  I talked about Sean and though I was very nervous, the whole experience was really productive and I learned a lot.  We have to turn in the final essay of the speech next week during the final exam.  The final exam is four hours long (!) and consists of reading, writing, listening and speaking.  It's worth 45% of the grade (!).  I'll keep you posted on how I do in the course.  At this point, the Japanese isn't too difficult, it's just that I don't have the amount of time to devote to memorizing how to write characters correctly.  My handwriting is known to be terrible and consistently shocks my handwriting teacher who bleeds over my grid paper with her red pen.  It's not pretty.  I'm hoping to pass the class so I can continue on to Japanese II but it's going to be a struggle - I'll let you know how it goes!

This weekend we were very excited to be able to attend a reception to welcome Assistant Secretary of State, Evan Ryan, to Tokyo.  We got invited because of our history with international exchange programs and citizen diplomacy.  The reception was held at the U.S. diplomats' housing compound in downtown Tokyo and was one of the fanciest parties that we've ever been to.  Unfortunately, this meant that we had to dress up which didn't bode well for Sean who hadn't even brought a pair of black pants to Japan.  Thankfully, his parents sent some dress clothes express mail which arrived the day before the event.  Thank you DHL!  Everything fit a little tighter than we remembered and we had to be very careful as we biked to the station in our business attire so as not to split our pants.


After everyone arrived and we were served drinks and appetizers, there were several speeches by the Consul General, the Minister Counselor for Public Affairs and then by Ms. Ryan herself.  Then we had time to mingle, go through the incredible buffet line and enjoy the view of Tokyo from the candlelit balcony.  It was so exciting!  We tried to act cool like we did this kind of thing every day, but I don't think we pulled it off.  Also, we were both so nervous and warm that we dripped with sweat most of the night.  Very classy.



I was introduced to Ms. Ryan by her chief of staff who briefed me and talked with me beforehand.  Ms. Ryan actually sat down and talked with me about my past experience with CIEE, Fulbright, Rotary, citizen diplomacy and my e-internship projects with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.  She was very friendly and professional and gave me one of her business cards and told me to keep in touch.

Sean and I both noticed right away that everyone at the party of about twenty-five people knew who we were and continually talked with us.  It was a bit creepy, actually.  We found out from one of the newer officers that they had received an email with people they that they were required to talk to and that our names were on the list.  Oddly, I had received an email from D.C. that night reminding me that people might know who we were or how we were connected and to not be shy to introduce ourselves.  All in all, we had so much fun and were very grateful to have been invited.  I am sure it will definitely be one of the highlights of our time here in Tokyo.

Since Sean is on the last step of his work visa (probably only two-ish more weeks to go!) he has quite a bit of free time (which he usually fills quite handily with ultimate frisbee).  About a month ago I had found out about an event that a local Japanese elementary school was hosting with the purpose of inter-cultural team-building and udon noodle making.  I really wanted to go, but since it was a day when I had class, I signed up Sean to go instead.  Thankfully, he is usually pretty tolerant about these kind of decisions.



He spent the whole day with the students and had a great time.  The school had invited foreigners from many parts of the world to participate, but Sean was the only American and native English speaker there.  The first part of the day consisted of team competitions with hula hoop races, telephone and various relays.  The second part of the day was learning how to make Japanese udon noodles and then eating them together.  Sean said that the teachers and cooks were happy to have him there since he was tall and could roll out the tough dough easily.  He ended up rolling out all of the groups' dough piles in the end.




Once again, we heard about this event through the local community organization called Glocal, which seeks to connect the community with international exchange participants.  We're hoping we can attend more fun events like this together in the future!